Ulfric-Shorts
by bluRaaven
Summary: A collection of short stories focusing on Ulfric, his friends and family, that want to be written, but for which I do not have sufficient headcanon to make them into something bigger. For now all of these happen in the Blacktyde world.
1. Literally

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	2. Sweetest Love

It is a great honour to serve the Jarl and his family. Hænir is tall, proud and beloved by all his subjects. These days there is more grey upon his head and in his beard than there is gold, but he had been a warrior of great renown in his youth, which has earned him the name by which the whole of Skyrim knows him: The Bear of Eastmarch.

His heir and eldest daughter, Frey, would not shame Talos himself if she were his bride, for she is the living embodiment of a shieldmaiden.

Ulfric is young, true, but he is solemn and shrewd beyond his years. He already knows how to use sword and shield, and is learned in the Way of the Voice, having just returned for a short visit from High Hrothgar.

And then there is Ísalind. The middle child.

She's short.

She's fat.

She spends the whole day in the kitchen, making pies and pastries and candies, or in the east wing, bent over boiling flasks and steamed up tubes, mumbling to herself.

It is unbefitting an occupation for a person of her descent. Galmar thinks she would do better to pick up a blade, and to train in the art of a warrior, instead of that of a _confectioner_.

Sharing this opinion with Ísa turns out to be a remarkably bad idea.

"Oh really." Her sleeves are done up and she is covered in flour past her elbows. Now that she has stopped rolling her dough the table no longer rocks back and forth with the force of her moves.

He may come to regret the hair-pulling and name-calling one day, but in his youth Galmar thinks that being a housecarl the whole world exists only to admire him and his prowess, and he is willing to spread that belief loudly and boisterously. (Thankfully, he was also young enough to learn better.)

Ísalind picks up the wooden roll, and without a warning, she brings it down on the tips of his fingers.

Galmar can hear the air escape him in a thin, high pitched whistle that the best of Windhelm's warriors cannot wring from him, and then he finds himself in an expeditious retreat that ends with him being cornered and hopelessly overcome, without mercy or the option of capitulation.

Though shorter by a head, Ísa possibly outweighs the warrior and unlike him, she doesn't have the slightest inhibition about laying on him. He might have lost _his_ , had the swollen sausages of his fingers been working, but as it is he is reduced to rethinking the life choices that have led him to this particular moment.

Galmar's regret at his former taunting runs very deep by the time the blows stop, and it is only because the incensed woman is too out of breath to keep up with calling him all manner of names from an unwashed mutt to a tottering, measly turnip-lover, and beating him up simultaneously.

"Now look what you did!"

He looks up from his curled-up position. "S' 'Orry." The repentance is real. He hadn't had his hide tanned like this since he'd been a kid and thought it would be great fun to play bandits and guards and to light a campfire in their living room.

"I'll give you _sorry_!" she shouts and waves the blood-stained wood under his nose. "Oh, get up, you wimp!" she says, focusing hard emerald eyes on Galmar, who after righting himself, takes a step back. Just to be sure.

"And get out of here, you scoundrel!" He is already well underway before she can finish the sentence.

"And get me a new rollingpin – or if I'll get my hands on you again, I'll wring your scrawny neck like a chicken's!"

His broken nose can wait. The questions of the guards at the gates can wait. The Lady Ísalind Lífsdottir requires a new rolly dough thingy and it is a task of such importance (and urgency) he cannot delay or entrust it to another.

oooo

He is still out of breath when he presents his newly purchased gift to her, held high on the bed of his palms, like it was an offering of great value.

Ísa takes it, weights it in her hands, then slaps the wood against her palm and harrumphs. "Good enough." She sees his expression and laughs, and wordlessly goes back to torturing the dough.

Knowing a bit how it feels to be worked over by her, Galmar feels a brief stirring of pity for the soon-to-be cake, but he also knows he has been dismissed. He departs with a bow he would otherwise only grace the Jarl with, and it earns him a glower – but also the fleeting ghost of a smile.

The housecarl is so lost in thought that out in the hall he nearly bumps into Ulfric.

The Jarl's son takes in the state of his bruised and bloody face with surprising calm. "What happened to you?" asks Ulfric.

Galmar sighs. "I think I fell in love."

"Must have been a long fall," one of the palace guards remarks, and he and his friend break into peals of laughter.

For a moment Ulfric seems perplexed, but unmistakably there is his sister's hum coming from the kitchen, and he leans to the side to look past his housecarl. His brows knit together. "She'll eat you whole," he says, suddenly looking worried.

Ulfric is eight. He doesn't understand why Galmar grins the way he does.


	3. Chapter 3

His father wishes to host a party in his son's honour, and to reintroduce his last living child and now heir – how raw and strange that thought still is – to the nobility of Windhelm.

Ulfric desires for nothing as much as to avoid all exposure to the sharp, judging stares of his peers and the whispers seeping from behind hand-covered mouths that speak honeyed words to his face and rip into him when his back is turned.

He would sooner have braved the front ranks again, but he oh-so-badly wants his father to be proud of him.

The last months are a wild, discordant disarray of sounds and impressions that clash and blend together in Ulfric's mind without actually making sense. But he is glad to have those moments, because they are not the terrible, seductive black of oblivion.

It has been nearly half a year now. The doctors say that he is as healed now in body as he is going to be.

No, the past months have not been easy on either of them.

oooo

Ulfric has dressed for the occasion but the heavy mantle of dark blue velvet trimmed with the grey fur of ermine is not nearly armour enough for him to feel comfortable. The absence of his blade is like a gaping wound in his side that is only filled by Galmar, when the housecarl comes to stand at his lord's right. Hidden in the pocket of his coat, Ulfric's fist unclenches.

It is one of his better days. Ulfric knows he has done well when, after the introductions are over, his father's radiant smile brings the sun's own warmth to his heart – Mara's Grace, but he looks so _old_ – and invites their guests to take their seats at their table.

Galmar rubs his scarred, cold-swollen hands together as the first course arrives, announced by the music of a silver bell. Ulfric's stomach wakes at the mouth-watering smell of freshly baked bread and roasted meat to growl in answer.

Heads turn towards the kitchen, and man with a bushy red beard laughs heartily at his companion's joke.

All is well.

It cannot last.

The knowledge is poison, slowly seeping through Ulfric's thoughts to taint all short-lived moments of peace and happiness. He knows he is like a rune left behind, waiting for the step of an unsuspecting person to fall where it shouldn't.

It comes with the reflection of fire dancing over a metal fork, with voices rising and falling in a crescendo of noise, with the clatter of cups and dishes, and juices leaking from a cut slab of meat, with the screech of a knife against a platter.

The urge doesn't have the courtesy to announce itself, it comes with all suddenness of hobelars and he is clutching the edge of the table, because he cannot let it take control of him.

Where he was in his father's hall before, partaking in a harmless dinner, Ulfric now finds himself shivering from the feeling of displacement. Nobody else seems to be aware of how the situation has changed, and that unsettles him even more. Where the mood had been celebratory, it has turned to menacing, yet the other guests are unaware of it, of their own strangeness as they laugh and shout on, feeding the chaos and the monster only he can see.

The scale topples, and it all becomes too much.

Ulfric wants to shout at them all to shut up, to leave and not intrude any longer, but instead he ends up trying to pick out something to cling to, a single thread of conversation to follow. But it slips through his fingers, drowned in a chorus of laughter from his right, and he is clenching his teeth so hard the muscles in his temples spasm.

Not even the pain can cut through the feeling of being a piece of straw caught in the rapid current of a river that carries him closer to a cascade, where he will shatter upon the rocks.

He tries to compress the feeling, to make it small and stuff it in a box of his own making. There he can and put it away, but it is struggling to break free, spilling over the edges. The lid is buckling, forced open by all that is contained inside, hinges giving away, wood shattering. He cannot keep it all locked up and it spills out, and over.

 _Too much_. He forgets how to breathe normally, sucking in air that he ends up holding in, and it makes it that much worse, the next gulp burning in his lungs. He has to get out, away from the overheated room, the noise closing in on him, but already his own reaction is beyond his control and he sits frozen, muscles locked, torn between the primal reactions to flee or to fight.

And then suddenly there's Galmar's paw right in his plate, blindly grasping for Ulfric's cut of meat, because the warrior's face is hidden by the cup that he drains in one go and puts down with a belch.

Everything winds down into sweet silence, and he is not adrift anymore, but at his father's dinner table, with his housecarl lifting the chop to his mouth, ripping at the meat and chewing loudly, groaning in pleasure.

"Somebody must have worked up quite a hunger," the Jarl's voice carries from the end of the table.

The servant waiting on them takes the unsubtle hint and gingerly offers Galmar a plate with potatoes, as if afraid that he might lose an arm to the warrior.

"Juss' a big 'un," Galmar chokes out, spittle and pieces of food flying from his grease-flecked lips and snatches a potato with all the table manners of a hungry dog.

"And a bucketful of small ones," Ulfric adds, mortified, which draws a round of polite snickers from the present company.

The blond warrior gives up on using cutlery and serves himself a second helping with his fingers, albeit with better bearings than Galmar has ever been capable of. Whatever he does now, the dinner guests will only see a thane trying to preserve the last shreds of his housecarl's dignity.

Most of the lords follow suit without hesitation. Torbjorn Shatter-Shield sighs in contentment and tears into his chicken leg with his teeth, like he had waited all evening to do nothing else.

Galmar passes out a few minutes into his food orgy and Ulfric saves young lady Tova from having a goblet of wine knocked into her lap, which earns him a thankful smile from the blushing girl.

The Jarl's son excuses himself and Galmar a couple of minutes later, under the pretence of having to take care of the other man.

He manages to get his housecarl vertical, and begins the arduous task of manoeuvring them both through the palace's hall and in the direction of their quarters. Once they are out of sight and hearing Galmar immediately rights himself, all signs of his inebriation falling off him without a trace left. His eyes glint knowingly in the eternal semi-dusk of the narrow corridor, giving away the lie of his former state.

"You're not as drunk as you pretend to be," Ulfric states, marginally displeased, but not truly surprised.

Galmar lifts one massive shoulder as if to say, 'what did you expect,' and jovially asks, "So what brought this one on?"

If only he knew. Ulfric pulls open the door to his wing and once inside, sinks into an armchair, kneading his brow. He does not understand his own mind, but he doesn't have to in order to know one thing.

"Thank you," he softly tells his housecarl.

"Anytime, Ulfric. At least until the Jarl no longer sees me fit to dine with men and confines me to the stables."

"Galmar."

"What?"

"You're not fit to _live_ amongst men."

Galmar grins and proves Ulfric's point by wiping his beard with a doily he has pulled from under a decorative crystal vase that one of the industrious servants has filled with freshly cut flowers this very morning.

He tosses the cloth into the corner once he is done with it.

There still is a glob of congealed grease staining his temple.

Galmar collapses into a chair, the protests of which are suffocated beneath the housecarl's bulk. "I was thinking about when Thorygg tried to shoot down the sun," he says with a far-away chuckle in an obvious attempt at distraction, "And how Hran found that badger and thought it was a stray dog!"

The warrior is using a blackened nail to pick food from between his teeth.

Ulfric could do without the sight. He shakes his head, and says, "He was touched in the head. They all were. What happened to it?"

"He set it on the cook," Galmar replies, flicking something from his fingertip. "I think it got away in the confusion."

"Ah, yes."

"Served the bastard right for cutting our shares. Never trust a fat cook."

An old army wisdom, that. "Remember when we went boar-hunting?" Ulfric asks his friend. He doesn't want to think about the war.

"Heh," Galmar rumbles with laughter. "Good times."

A knock on the door interrupts their reminiscence. The housecarl's head falls back and he releases a thunderous snore.

When the door opens it is none other than the Jarl who lets himself into his son's room. Ulfric stands to greet his father, and offer him his seat that the Bear waves away. He braces himself against the chair instead, and it pains Ulfric to witness it, this cursed weakness that there is no cure for.

"The guests have just left," Hænir informs him.

Ulfric does not reply.

It is impossible that his father does not know what had really happened. But the Jarl only frowns at Galmar's sprawling corpse and shakes his head over the man's earlier actions.

"Maybe it would be better if your housecarl lays off the wine a little bit?"

When had they gotten this good at deception?

Over the last months the silence and cautious distance between father and son has grown into something solid and wedge-shaped. Ulfric knows not how to breach it, but it proves inconsequential. His father's hands land on his shoulder and arm, a loving caress that brings with it the weight of the world for one who has forgotten how to respond to it.

"You did very well tonight," his father says with a smile that is full of pride and a hint of tenderness that stirs intruding feelings of shame. "That was some quick thinking of you."

"I'll have words with him," Ulfric replies earnestly, feeling slightly guilty because of the lie, but mostly like laughing at the giddy feeling of relief and the ridiculousness of the situation, especially when Galmar cracks open one beady eye and grimaces once the Jarl's back is turned.

The Bear nods, pleased with the answer, and with one last squeeze of his brittle fingers he leaves. Galmar closes his eyes again and snores on – but what remains is the smile on Ulfric's face.


End file.
